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How Hong Kong's Protestors Are Hindering (and Hijacking) the Tools of Surveillance
Simply moving through the physical world in regions with massive, powerful surveillance systems threatens to strip one of their anonymity, and in places with anti-government demonstrations, that threat is disturbingly amplified. But protestors in Hong Kong are countering these gross invasions of privacy.
In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands of civilians are estimated to have filled the streets in June to protest a bill that would allow the government to extradite suspected criminals to mainland China, a violation of their democratic freedom. Anti-extradition demonstrations have been ongoing for weeks in Hong Kong, and police are turning to increasingly aggressive and violent means to quash the efforts. In response, protestors created their own channel to identify plainclothes cops.
The channel, called Dadfindboy, was created on cloud-based messaging app Telegram and has over 50,000 subscribers, according to a report published on Friday by the New York Times. The channel was largely created in response to cops no longer wearing their identification badges, and reportedly doxxed officers with posts including their personal information, social media posts, and both intimate photos and photos of their family.
[...] The New York Times report also illustrated how protestors fought back against surveillance devices. During a demonstration on Sunday, some of them reportedly aimed laser pointers at cameras and spray painted surveillance cameras outside of the government liaison office.
A protestor detailed in the report, Colin Cheung, also began to develop a tool to deal with corrupt plainclothes cops, but ultimately ceased efforts because he didn't have the time. The concept for the tool, though, is an ironic display of how surveillance tools can be used to counter each other. Cheung had started creating a facial recognition tool that used an algorithm to match photos that had been posted on the internet with photos of police officers in an attempt to identify those who no longer identified themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @04:09PM (3 children)
my theory is that government plans ahead.
but when hks lease was up and returned to china the government wasnt able to plan ahead.
thus minions born during the handover time had no future planned for them and now the economy cannot absorbe them,
keep them busy making money for growing the next generation of miniondom.
thus the minions without a planned economic future have too much time on their hands now and go demonstrait.
ofc the government taking over knew this at the time, since "taking over the economy" required to plan ahead but had no permission pre-handover time.
the solution, like always, will probably be some large scale mountain island flattening, enlarging the island, connecting it with roads and bridges and whatnot and then errection "cheap" housing silos. this will keep the minions happy, because busy and paid.
the problem will be demonstrations (behind the scenes) about falling land prices and loss of paper gains because it is artifical inflated by limited land due to hk being lots of island and limited mainland area?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @08:11PM
lern2rite
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday July 28 2019, @09:49PM (1 child)
Thanks A/C, but your theory shows a startling ignorance of Hong Kong and China and is wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @10:35PM
tea, opium and silver ... nuff said